poetry 6 / feeling autumnal / big news (edited!)

It's grey here, and rainy most of the day, and at about 5:30 the clouds parted and there was that fresh blue sky. Fresh makes me think of Hopkins (Girard Manley), and from there I'm leapfrogged into spring and love and hope and the optimism that keeps the world going around.

If you need healing,
just go to the doctor, I mean
that familiar spine, and open it. A lion waits.
A field of bobolinks. The doorways
and sprinkled streets
and blackbirds.

It makes me think of my students, how much teaching changed my writing, changed my thinking (how it still does both!). How integral the act of generosity required by teaching is to the selfish act of writing for me. How they could come into the poetry classrom and leave changed, and leave me changed, too. How the world always seemed to have that certain smell on Tuesday nights, the smell of things opening. The smell of snow. Magic.

It is magic, propagating the love of words. Love of beauty. It is pure body, it happens inside the human being who has forgotten it can happen, or didn't know it could. It is lines like

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

--for their soundplay and their wordplay and their love of the imperfect (evident also by the oddity that sprung meter [which Hopkins developed--a 'broken' meter, or rhythm, to counter a more regular and traditional one] must have been). The poem is "Pied Beauty," and it should have lovely indents, as it does here, but Blogger doesn't let me.

Please don't be afraid to comment. I've gotten several lovely, kind emails from people who feel intimidated by the subject of poetry. Well, I can't lie: I do think there are 'right readings.' But I would never be anything but interested and grateful for your comments and your ideas and your thoughts on what I've put down in these little 'lessons.'

Because here it is fall, the season of back-to-school and cooling temperatures, and the smell of apples. And the lonely season (of mists and mellow fruitfulness! name that poet!), which makes having some invisible lines out there to you just a bit nicer.

I leave for France in eight days. I don't know what my access to internet will be like there (any tips on getting it set up, anyone? I will need it for a freelance job I have while I'm there), but I wanted to tell you the reason I will be back home in April, rather than staying on.

I wrote, as my thesis, a manuscript of poems. An excellent literary, non-profit publisher bought the manuscript this past July, and will publish it (with extremely unusual alacrity, for the industry) this spring. A real book. As in, go to your local bookstore and they will have it. Or you can ask them to have it. It already has its ISBN (edit: here it is! thanks to Kelly of Weaving Major. Wow! That sure makes it real). The title is Music for Landing Planes By. I feel quite surreal about it all, really. And now the cat's out of the bag. I'm coming home in April to do readings.

If you would like to read some poetry of mine before the book is released, I can maybe figure out a way to post a sample on my webpage. Should I?